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Being a slightly improved Excel has significant advantages as well:

It's more accessible to people who are not coders but need to do statistics on real data, i.e. almost all researchers.

Although personally, I would use R/Python (the UI is more suited to me, and it's free, and I trust the results a little more, and I can read the code if I need to)... do you actually need anything more than SAS/SPSS provides? I doubt it.

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The way in which SAS is like Excel is that everything is a table.

SAS is not very accessible, especially to non-coders.

Apologies, I haven't used SAS in so long that I had it confused slightly with SPSS.

I'd argue that SAS is much more accessible to non-coders than either R or Python, in that the SAS language is mostly an invocation of statistical procedures, rather than a full-on programming language.

From a field dominated by SAS, moving to R was a pretty steep transition, whereas when I approached R from having learned Python, things made a great deal more sense having been exposed to other programming languages.

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